Podcast Summary: "Learning How to Cite Judith Butler"

Podcast: LSE: Public Lectures and Events
Host: Claire Hemmings (Director, LSE Gender Institute)
Speaker: Professor Robyn Wiegman (Duke University)
Date: November 9, 2009

Overview

This episode, part of LSE’s Gendering the Social Sciences series, features Robyn Wiegman’s lecture "Learning How to Cite Judith Butler." Wiegman examines the shifting frameworks and disciplinary practices in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies—particularly the US context—and interrogates the move from ‘women’ to ‘gender’ as the primary object of study. Through a reflective and critical approach, she explores how academic disciplines are shaped by political desires, narratives of progress, institutional forms, and the citational habits epitomized by figures like Judith Butler. The episode also includes an insightful Q&A exploring the relationship between academia and activism, the tension between identity and political coalitions, and the challenges of disciplinary critique.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Setting the Context ([00:00-04:49])

• Claire Hemmings introduces Wiegman, outlining her scholarship, areas of inquiry, and contributions to feminist studies, queer theory, and American Studies.
• The lecture examines the disciplinary and institutional evolution from Women’s Studies to Gender Studies, especially within the US, and the symbolic role of “citing Judith Butler” as an emblem of critical value.

2. The Lecture: Four Main Sections

a. Background and Motivation ([04:49-14:30])

• Wiegman explains her long-standing engagement with the topic, reflecting on the process of researching and revising her work over time.
• She candidly discusses the anxieties and temporalities of academic writing, using her own evolving essays as examples.
• Memorable quote:
  “If you’re like me, you don’t want to throw any words away because you suffered over them… so you’ve been trying to figure out how to mesh these disparate temporalities.” (09:44)

b. The Object of Study as Disciplinary (Not Just Political) Practice

• Argues that the way fields like Women’s or Gender Studies relate to their objects of study (e.g., women, gender) operates as a disciplinary apparatus—one that structures what “counts” as political.
• The institutionalization of these fields does not remove the political, but rather institutes a specific vision of it.
• Wiegman focuses on Butler not for her content, but for how her signature serves as a “sign of critical value,” shaping the citational and field imaginary.

3. Major Thematic Sections

I. Transferential Objects ([26:20-34:28])

• Draws on Leora Auslander’s work (“Do Women’s, Feminist, Men’s, Lesbian and Gay/Queer Studies = Gender Studies?”) to illustrate the shift from “women” to “gender” as an organizing category.
• Critical expansion: Gender is mobilized to include men, sexualities, and trans issues, creating both hope for inclusivity and anxiety about losing feminist political commitments and allowing “gender” to become deracinated from feminist politics.
• Notes persistent worries about the potential occlusion of race and the challenge of interdisciplinarity.
• Quote:
  “Gender as a category performs the optimistic hope that a relation of compatibility, if not consistency, between critical practice and field domain can finally be won...” (34:12)
• Observes that the field’s faith has shifted from “women” to “gender,” but the structure of aspiration remains intact.

II. What Was Women ([34:29-50:33])

• Details how the so-called failure of “women” as a universal category became foundational in the field’s self-narration.
• Critical accounts position difference (race, sexuality, class) as what “undoes” women as an adequate category, but Wiegman critiques this narrative for conflating critique of the category with critique of its use.
• Argues for more nuanced histories—e.g., acknowledging how standpoint theory and figures like Nancy Hartsock, Catharine MacKinnon, and Patricia Hill Collins struggled with anti-essentialist accounts of women.
• Quote:
  “To the extent that the progress narrative of gender situates the critique of the category of women as outside the struggle to produce and evince the political agency of women, it has not only misunderstood the founding paradigm, but consecrated its self-defining political superiority precisely by doing so.” (48:10)
• Challenges the field’s tendency to flatten prior eras as complicit, urging recovery of the “thickness” and complexity of earlier feminist negotiations.

III. Critical Realism ([52:50-59:24])

• Discusses how interdisciplinarity in Gender Studies is often positioned as a progress narrative—a way to “do justice” to complex social problems (e.g., violence against women).
• Critiques the “critical realist” move where the field conflates its analytic categories and aspirations with the objects in the world—assuming the right disciplinary structure can fix social problems.
• Warns this can create a circular logic: the institutional form and critical apparatus become an end in themselves.

IV. When Gender Fails ([59:25-62:54])

• Reflects on the inevitability of new objects or approaches (gender, transnational, intersectional, etc.) eventually “failing” to resolve the field’s founding desire for commensurability between politics and critique.
• Asserts that political desire for progress or adequacy is inherent, yet warns against unchecked faith in ever-new frameworks (e.g., transnational replacing national, queer replacing gender).
• Quote:
  “I totally understand… the political desire to get out of and escape the moment that we’re in and to escape the incapacity of the present. But… we need harder conversations about the ‘culture of the political’ that conditions critical practice today.” (61:00)

4. Audience Q&A Highlights ([63:41-85:45])

a. Disciplinarity, Writing, and Conversation

• Sarah Franklin (LSE): Asks about whether focusing on writing and citation (versus dialogue/pedagogy) shapes the kind of progress narrative Wiegman critiques.
• Wiegman: Agrees, but argues that current institutional forms (doctoral training, academic production) foreground writing, making these dynamics central.
  • Quote:
    “Many of my graduate students say, ‘No, we have to learn how to do these before you deconstruct them, because we’re spending a lot of money, we’re spending a lot of time trying to belong to a field…’” (66:14)

b. Identity, Universalism, and Activism

• Akhir (audience): Queries the basis of political coalition—identity vs. shared questions, and highlights the porous boundary between academia and activism in non-Western contexts.
• Wiegman:
  • The debate between academia and activism is internal to the discipline as much as a divide with the outside.
  • Calls for an expansive, less narrow conception of “the political,” emphasizing divergence between academic and activist trajectories.
  • Quote:
    “I actually think that the choice between what now stands as the academic and the activists are themselves rather… limited, can be very narrow… especially in the US.” (74:32)

c. Performative Nature of Critique

• Maria (audience): Observes how Wiegman preempts critiques and questions, making it challenging for students to know how to productively engage.
• Wiegman:
  • Acknowledges this disciplinary reflex, likens it to voices of anxiety and repeated objections in academic life.
  • Claims an interest in reconstructing the intellectual subject, not just the social subject, and in restoring the “thickness” of past feminist moments.
  • Quote:
    “It’s a wonder that we can write at all now because… you hear these voices… that undermine you as you go.” (79:47)

5. Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• On disciplinary progress narratives:
  “The field has many progress narratives, in part because the disciplinary apparatus of the field produces progress as the political imaginary in which we operate.” (50:14)

• On universalism and intersectionality:
  “The left political aspiration for difference to lead to the resolution of inequality and hierarchy is undone by the cultural struggle waged over its meaning.” (49:44)

• On citational politics:
  “By calling this talk ‘Learning How to Cite Judith Butler’, I want to reference the power of the critical habits that we learn as the means to write our belonging to the field.” (29:35)

• On critical practice and politics:
  “We’re all going to actually repeat and reproduce the very thing that we see that shapes the critical practice we’re engaged in… pointing out when other people do it is not really doing a whole lot other than a kind of ego management.” (58:10)

6. Memorable Moments & Takeaways

• The lecture balances a critique of institutionalized narratives without devolving into cynical anti-theory, holding open the necessity—and the impossibility—of ever fully achieving the field’s political aspirations.
• Wiegman’s style is collegial, self-reflexive, at times humorously candid (“if you’re like me, you don’t want to throw any words away because you suffered over them…”), and always attentive to the affective and institutional life of academic knowledge.
• The discussion exposes the paradoxes and ambivalences at the heart of feminist and intersectional scholarship: pursuit of justice through critique, faith in new analytic categories, and the endless reiteration (and anxiety) of disciplinary routines.
• The Q&A reflects live dilemmas for the field: how to train scholars, relate to activism, and critically situate one’s own position without getting caught in cycles of closure or despair.

7. Conclusion

Wiegman’s lecture is a nuanced, critical exploration of the genealogies and affects that shape Gender Studies, using “citing Judith Butler” as an entry point into larger questions about disciplinarity, political investment, and institutional life. The talk encourages practitioners to move beyond simple progress narratives and confront the complex apparatuses—both intellectual and affective—that govern the field. Listeners are left with an invitation to reflect on their own attachments, aspirations, and the histories they inherit and reproduce as participants in feminist scholarly practice.